Breathing
by coefficientheidi
Summary: The smallest gestures often mean the most.


There are times when I wish someone would simply stay.

These moments feel weak, as though they ought to be reserved for others who are more pathetic than I. I am unaccustomed to relying on someone else, unfamiliar with depending on anyone to be there past the point in which something I am able to provide gives them pleasure. I've been abandoned for something as simple as a body part.

I should not need anyone, but I have felt loneliness. Frighteningly true to me is the realization that no one would notice if I did not return home at night—much more, that there is no real home for me to return to. I wonder if it is too much for me to think I could ever live up to my own desires.

People don't stay.

They never stay. Other things catch their eyes, and I know that I can never be enough. I have never been enough. I know that they will leave me, hate me, or become bored with me. It does not matter what anyone says—infatuation is a temporary condition, and I am able to kill it in someone else faster than anyone in existence.

When I concentrate on it for too long, dozens of little breaths build up in my lungs, piling on top of one another until I feel near to exploding.

Kurama will offer me a cup of steaming chocolate beverage and I will snatch it away from him before our fingers have touched. Linger too long, and he might sense it. Maybe hope and fear can be communicated through our skin.

I inhale. That cup is everything anyone has wanted to give me.

_Wanted _to give me, and I could not bear to be brave.

Sometimes I merely stare at him until he resignedly places it on the table and seats himself in the chair on the other side.

"It will get cold if you let it sit for too long," he will say to me.

"Easily repaired."

"I suppose."

Kurama is not like me. Kurama is comfortable with waiting. I do not understand why. Is his life so menial now that he has nothing better to do? Has he already seen so much that he might as well just sit and do nothing? He never knows in advance that I'm visiting, but he always allows me into his home, and so the ritual begins.

He watches me.

Sometimes he makes small talk. Sometimes I pay attention.

"The weather has been dry lately," he will say. "Everyone will be happy to see it rain."

He never talks about himself.

On this particular night, I'm seated awkwardly in an armchair, drowning in the whirlpool of my own feelings, my eyes flicking between the table, the cup, and Kurama's face. My boots, necessary for my departure, are seemingly miles away, beneath the window under which he told me to deposit them. I want to leave, but my lungs are too heavy to move.

"Yusuke wants us all to get together again. I think he misses the…"

My racing thoughts drown out the sound of Kurama's voice. I am thinking to myself about whether there is a place I will stay forever and whether or not there is someone who would have me for that long. I am wondering why I would bother thinking that in the first place, because I have never believed in forever and am finding it painful to start. I am worrying myself over Yukina, because I want to be her brother forever, but I do not know how to do that. It is as though a multitude of weak moments—the ones I've never allowed myself to have—are finally occurring all at the same time.

"You're awfully tense tonight."

I don't know how to respond. I am going to rupture. Wounds and lacerations I can endure, but this pain is internal, and it nicks shreds from the lining of my heart so that my feelings pour out, threatening to drown me.

Kurama's gaze jerks downward, hinting.

I lean forward and take the cup. My hands tremble as I do, causing me to experience a sudden and foreign distress at not knowing how to make them stop. I struggle with it mere seconds before the cup cracks and breaks beneath the pressure of my fingers, and I find myself staring confusedly at the mess of liquid and porcelain on the chair and in my lap.

If it burns, I do not notice.

There is a hand on my shoulder.

"Hiei."

I had not realized that Kurama moved, and, looking up at him now, while the warmth of his palm permeates my clothing and his eyes pierce whatever is left of me, I feel so very desperate for the contact. The very essence of his being radiates the peaceful self-assurance that I crave, stability I desire so badly that I want to reach out, reach inside him, and grasp it for myself.

My fingers twitch, either from the scalding temperature of the spilled beverage or from something less tangible.

I stare blankly up at Kurama.

"It will be all right," he says.

He squeezes my shoulder once, briefly, then releases me so that he is able to clean up the mess.

It will be all right, he had told me. Kurama, who has not lied to me yet, and who, for some impossible reason, I feel inclined to trust now, even if his words seem too far from the truth.

All right.

I exhale.


End file.
